The writing is crisp, each vignette clearly defined. I especially enjoyed the expanation of Carth's 'I have my orders' comment, because the author is right. I enjoyed all three chapter (Only a bit over 1500 words, so I could take the time) and I was glad I did. Only one problem...

The piece was a bit of fun, since the Gizka was the one part that irritated me the most. Having Revan already knowing who he was again, and mixing his attraction to Bastila into getting rid of the little monsters was choice.

The piece is a riot. Starting with the character being the handyman from hell, rigging her footlocker to explode in the hope that one specific man would try to raid it, confusing Sith troops long enough to escape, dancing to her communicator after she reset the ring to her favorite song, and almost killing herself with a lightsaber she picked up. Her question is one all of us have had; how do you make a weapon of light but at the same time, limit it's scope?

Eleven chapters, and hasn't even gotten off Taris!

Only one negative, and that is technical:

Technical note, nomenclature: Different terms are used aboard ship. Go to Lucasforums> Knights of the Old Republic> Coruscant Entertainment Center>The Resource Center>Ship nomenclature, or; It's not a door, it's a hatch blast it! To get what I am pointing out.

While technically excellent, I felt a little down by the end of it. Neither one is really expecting to win, though all Carth has to do is endure. Both the victim and tormentor are going through the motions. The best part is the internal monologues. Both in their own way hope for another ending.

Remember conversation breaks. The narrative flow kept being interrupted because you ran them together. Also you tossed extra characters in for no purpose. You have a Colonel arrive, greeteds by a Major, then you throw in a lieutenant, an Admiral (Who should have been addressed first as the senior in rank) then the Moff, the Lord, the Inquisitor, and the prisoner, followed by the death of that prisoner out of pique alone. Yet there was no rhyme nor reason to it.

Originally reviewed 28 October 2005 over at kotorfanmedia. That review is below:

Yano Upav

The story of Revan’s ascent from the view of his bodyguard droid.

Well written, and the viewpoint is superb. Yano gets into the circuits of HK, and through them you see the people around him. The ‘death and destruction’ view of HK works well in the fleet action, which ends the first posting, and makes me want to read more.

Addenda: The piece is still well written, and unlike a lot of authors, this one didn't hang around the half dozen planets used in the original game. After I had been doing these reviews for about a year, I began adding technical commentary because of flaws that are not readily apparent without a deeper knowledge base than I had at the start, and I do have to add one here.

Technical note: According to the dialogue, the ships are making a deep penetration hit and run attack, but they are going about it in a roundabout fashion that makes no sense. Nal Hutta to Falleen, then to Sullust, and then on to Corellia. Use this as an historical example:

Quantrill's Raiders are assigned to make a deep penetration attack in the North. They deploy from St Louis Missouri, then attack Cinncinati Ohio, travel to Detroit, then San Francisco, and finally attack their primary target, Siver Springs Maryland...

While all legitimate targets, they are also so widely scattered that it would take almost a year to carry out all of the attacks. And while they are riding around, they would have people not only in pursuit, but being warned ahead of them, so this raid wouldn't last that long.

Also, if you're doing a hit and run, you don't waste time with much beyond smashing any ships at your target and the orbital infrastructure, so deploying a ground assault is an unnecessary expenditure of resources.

TSL on Malachor V: The Exile must choose, and he chooses the path of honor

The piece is well done, and the backstory helped, because he had done everything to be bad until the end. Like Vader in the ROTJ he finally decides to do what right, not what is expedient.

Technical note: Your description of the Mass Shadow Generator is flawed; probably because the writers of the game never described it's operation, and we gamers finally worked out how it had to work only after the fact. What you describe is more of a high level electro-magnetic pulse generator or the radiation pulse generator used in the 1987 movie Project X, while the term Mass Shadow is a gravitational term meaning the area of effect of a star or planet, in other words, a generator that creates the effect of having the gravity well of a star suddenly appear, as if used in the EU by an Interdictor type Star Destroyer. An EMP generator would not have destroyed all of the ships supposedly lost at Malachor, but something creating the Mass Shadow of a B class star, something a hundred times as massive as our own sun, would have.

Also, you have the Ebon Hawk and her crew still within the area of effect of the device when it is activated, meaning they should have automatically died as well.

The piece was amusing, but I kept coming back to the one flaw. Christmas is an Earth holiday. Read my article Lucasforums> Knights of the Old Republic> Coruscant Entertainment Center > Resource Center> The Expert Forum > Page 3 > Post 118 about how to adjust holidays so they don't come across as our own.

The piece has a good basic concept, and I was willing to suspend disbelief right up to the addition of the clone. There's a reason for this, however.

Technical, cloning: First the actual procedure, creating a clone, is simplicity itself, even with our own limited technology. However the danger (Suggested because of the criteria you suggest, the strongest being chosen) is not to the subject, but to the clone itself. All the donor loses is some cells, the clone has to go through the rapid maturation process, which has dangers of it's own.

In the EU and AOTC, they constantly harp on the fact that the clones are aging at a ratio of two to one; they are aging two years for every standard year they live. So the bright new clones who marched off to war at the start at age 18 would be 24 when the war ended, and have only half the life expectancy of a normally produced offspring. By the time of the Rebellion when Luke Skywalker joined it, any of those clones that had survived would be an apparent 68 years old; too old to go into combat.

The main issue, stopping that accelerated aging, has been addressed by Karen Traviss who has written the lion share of the books from the Clone/Mando'a view, but the book that mentions it is during the post Imperial period.

For them to remain viable for any greater period would require that you first create a way to force their development at the accelerated rate, but also to stop the process before senility.

The second is the memory writing you mention, and is used in a few of the EU books, but is never adequately explained. The idea of such a procedure is used in two different works; the first Ghost in the Shell series, and Elizabeth Moon's Familias Regnant series. In both cases however, the presence of the principle (In this case, Mical) is required to download memories that can be installed in the clones (or cyborgs in GITS) so that they are all on the same page as it were. So every few weeks or months, Mical would have to disappear, get recorded, and return.

Third, even though he is the subject of this cloning, that doesn't automatically give him title to the cloned copy, or use of it. If, for example, if a lab here in the US was working on human cloning, not only would it be secret, it would also not let the clone out of their sight. It represents a number of possibilities such as an organ donor for the subject, but also a way to rejuvenate politicians in power by allowing them to transfer their memories into that younger body. Not to mention the mere cost of the procedure, which while cheap is not as cheap as having a natural child. Using it at all could limit them to just spare parts, or like the Clone Wars, expendable assets. But still they would be close held.

So it is unlikely that Mical would have been able to get the clone, and place it in such a way that it died instead of him. Besides, look at the movie the 6th day where a man had been cloned, but we don't know until the end which is the clone. Will the clone be willing to die in the original's place? After all, he would think he was the original unless told otherwise.

'To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.' Now who said that?